7/8/08

I don't really care about this one bit. But who could resist writing such a wonderful and mystifying headline?

Do the Haredim know how much this publicity is worth to the Axe brand? I never heard of it before and now I have watched (with utter disgust of course) about a dozen Axe commercials on YouTube including this one which is tame enough for me to post here, and viewed there nearly 3 million times.

The other Axe videos are awful -- too sexually suggestive and laced with nudity -- but verrry funny -- no, check that, I mean very terrible and objectionable and contributing to the decay of human civilization and especially damaging to Orthodox Jewish men, like me.

And now for that truly meaningless Haaretz story (worth $? in PR $?)...

A recent marketing campaign for Unilever's Axe deodorant for men raised the hackles of the ultra-Orthodox community when the corporation sponsored a poolside party for teens, DJed by a topless Hungarian disc jockey flown in for the event, and attended by other partially-clad young women.

Unsurprisingly, despite Unilever's written apology to the Haredi community, its leaders remain unsatisfied. Rabbi Gabriel Papenheim, who chairs the Kashrut Committee for Badatz, told TheMarker that the matter was initially to have ended with their apology, but Badatz is now demanding that an apology also be published in the secular press....

"Oh, and just one more video," he said, Columbo-like... justifying its inclusion here by noting the centrality of the Holy Bible to the commercial advertisement...I hope someone notices my headline pun on "incensed" and "deodorant".